


Haunted (These Ghosts Are Mine)

by OnceABlueMoon



Series: Nano [1]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, Dark, Dreams, Dreams and Nightmares, M/M, Soulmates, Ten Years Later Arc (Reborn), like dark future idea, soulmate dreams
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-03
Updated: 2018-11-03
Packaged: 2019-08-17 04:23:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16509326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OnceABlueMoon/pseuds/OnceABlueMoon
Summary: Tsuna’s never seen anything but this fight in his soulmate dreams, nothing but this fight, and the corpse after. He’s beginning to see just why that is.





	Haunted (These Ghosts Are Mine)

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own Katekyo Hitman Reborn

Enma is four and gets a little sister.

He dreams of his hands like claws in his hair, ripping it out with love in his heart. It is a thousand fathoms deep and just as dark.

Despair clouds his head, the taste of rotting leaves in his mouth. 

.

_(It’s a dream)_

.

Enma is six and can stand just so on his tippy toes to reach the ripest tomato on the plant. His mother laughs and kisses the wide brim of his sunhat. ‘’My little boy!’’

He dreams of a tall girl- Adelheid?- slamming a picture down on a scratched up, dusty table. The left edge of the picture curls up. Brown eyes, caramel hair and a black suit. Just as black as the soul he must have, with the name she attaches to it.

Bile rises in his throat and it needs to go out, out, out, and he runs to the bathroom with it burning like acid in his mouth.

Vomit is not the only thing that drains down the toilet, his hopes and dreams do as well.

.

_(He wakes up gasping, but his dad smoothes away his frown. ‘’It’ll be alright. You’ll always have us.’’_

_He goes back to sleep, safety warm around him)_

_._

Enma is seven and his family is dead, murdered by the Vongola, right in front of their eyes. Only those who hid away behind the corpses survived. Mami was not one of those, and despair crawls into his everything.

Adel shoves, pushes, drags them until they get up and walk with her, if only not to die in the dust. She’s made of ice, sunlight sparkling off her, but there’s a kind of love in her Enma wishes he understood, wishes he could feel through the numbness, and it makes her desperate and beautiful, and forms her into the greatest, harshest woman he knows.

She is kind at heart. But never gentle.

He dreams of nothing but death, but it is not like waking brings him a better sight.

.

_(His soulmate dreams have always been nightmares, and Enma does not understand how he could not see this coming._

_His life is a nightmare. His soulmate is a greater one._

_His name was on the murder of his famiglie)_

_._

Enma is ten and he reads about the Simon rings.

They search everywhere, but they can’t find a trace, and they’re just lost, angry children left alone on a blood-drenched island. They’ve got to return to civilization eventually because the wilderness of Simon Island can’t sustain them forever. Not with how frighteningly thin they already are.

People cannot live off revenge. Eventually, they get tired. He buries the anger together with the hate and walks on towards a new day.

…It’s not like anyone who could’ve t _old_ them about the rings is still alive, after all. Begging the dead to speak up has never helped anyone, and breaking down next to their graves never ends in anything but tears.

He dreams of a newscast, declaring Sawada Tsunayoshi to be undesirable number one.

.

_(It’s a dream, but Enma laughs because that’s the first time he ever heard something about his soulmate he agreed with)_

_._

Tsuna is fourteen, and he is forced into the inheritance ceremony. In another life, perhaps someone would’ve interrupted it. In another life, perhaps, Tsuna wouldn’t have been driven into a corner like this. In another life, Tsuna might not have screamed at Hayato.

But he did. He did, and he broke his guardian's trust, and in the middle of his breakdown, he says things so absolutely a _wful_ that none of them are ever quite the same after.

‘’I wish this never happened. I wish I had never been born. I wish that you’d stayed in goddamn Italy being poisoned by your goddamn sister so I wouldn’t have to deal with this. Small, rotting corpse in a ditch somewhere. Maybe if Yamamoto had jumped off that building I’d have the excuse of not having a full guardian set. Had Chrome starved, Mukuro been killed for the umpteenth time, st _ayed in that goddamn lab to be tortured for all eternity.’’_ He stands there, chest heaving, his guardians staring at him with wide eyes. The tension is so thick you could cut it, but Tsuna can’t bring himself to regret it. The toxicity of it all has been there for a long time- trapped, just like the rest of him, and of course it’d come to a head at some point. Which just so happened to be the day of the inheritance ceremony, the day when his fate would be sealed, the day of this _mental breakdown._

Lambo, not feeling the moment at all, storms in. ‘’Tsuna-niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii! Mama said you have grape candy!’’  

Tsuna looks up, looks him straight in the eye, hands in his hair as he tears out hands full. He sobs, desperate, at the end of his wits, poison spewing from his lips as if he were a fountain.  ‘’Lambo, just accept that NOBODY LOVES YOU.’’

He dreams of red hair and his hands around a neck.

.

_(There’s hate too, but that’s not much different from waking)_

_._

Tsuna is sixteen, and he lives fully in Italy now. His relationships with his guardians were never quite the same after the inheritance ceremony, but he can’t bring himself to care. Not when he hates them. Hates them so much it boils his skin until he throws all his hate in their direction. Until they are just as trapped as he is in this prison of the mafia and ‘’harmony’’- like they’ve been able to connect over anything but desperation in quite some time.

Tsuna is sixteen and he tries to escape.

Reborn drags him back by his hair. They place literal bars before his windows now.

He dreams of sobbing over a corpse with red hair. There are strangulation marks over their neck, and many other injuries besides. Rain attempts to wash the blood away, but nothing washes away the dead. Tsuna knows that by now.

.

_(He murdered the guards on his way out during his escape. Just like his soulmates blood will one day stain his hands, theirs did. It won’t go away, no matter how raw he scrubs them)_

_._

Tsuna is eighteen, and he has given up hope. He resigns himself to his prison, bitter and lonely by his own design. At this point, he knows he’ll never get out. Not alive, at least. It creeps into his heart, that thought. It creeps into that maelstrom of malice twisting his insides. It’s searching for release, and finally, the thought comes to him:

If they don’t have the mercy to destroy him completely, he’ll destroy them.

He doesn’t have enough raw power to defeat Reborn, of course, but his guardians… It doesn’t have to be by flames. It just has to be vicious. There are many ways to destroy someone, after all.

It becomes a game.

Gokudera is, despite his utter devotion initially, very hard to hurt simply because he never trusted Tsuna after the inheritance ceremony. He’s smart- once he is hurt, he never lets the same person hurt him that way twice.

Yamamoto is different- he’s just as psycho as Tsuna underneath, just much more considerate of other people. He tends to stick close to Gokudera, far out of Tsuna’s way. This, more than anything, protects him because Gokudera is paranoid for both of them.

Nobody’s let Lambo close to Tsuna in years. They’re at least smart about that.

Mukuro is the most fun when it gets down to it. It might not seem like it, but where Ryohei is an open soul, so ridiculously easy to hurt, torturing Mukuro is a game. Mukuro likes to pretend he’s aloof like nothing can get to him, when in truth he gets so easily attached. Just look at Ken and Chikusa, who he rescued from their shared prison. Look at Chrome, who he took in under the pretence of needing a body when in the end he just loved her.

It is so, so easy to hurt him.

Hibari is the most stoic, the one who had the least investment in Tsuna in the first place. Perhaps this is why Tsuna crushes those yellow birds he so adores. Why he leaves puddles of dirty yellow feathers and flesh in front of Hibari’s door, just to see his face.

Tsuna’s insane, and more than a bit suicidal.

He dreams of stomping down on a human body, much harder in consistency than the birds were.

.

_(He doesn’t care much for his soulmate dreams. Far more interesting are the dark clouds gathering at the horizon, the whispers of some organization called Millefiore. Maybe someone’s finally coming to put the Vongola down like the dogs they are._

_If Tsuna is part of them, well, perhaps he wouldn’t mind being dead so much)_

_._

Tsuna is twenty, and Reborn is dead.

It’s strange, how it takes something like death to remind Tsuna that he actually gave a fuck about things. It’s probably some strange form of Stockholm syndrome, but in some very fucked up way, Tsuna had loved his jailer.

He remembers who he used to be for the first time in years, and it fucks him up. It fucks him up so bad, to the point where it almost makes him go catatonic. His guardians, stuck in the prison that is Tsuna himself, see their opportunity and try to… Tsuna doesn’t know what they try. It’s obviously supposed to stabilize him, under the cover of caring about him, but…

Tsuna has hurt them. For many, many years. If they love him, they love him in just such a fucked up way as he loved Reborn. The only way a prisoner can love their jailer. It’s unbalanced. Not healthy. But then again, Tsuna hasn’t been healthy for a long time. He remembers being fourteen.

(Soft boy, gentle child, Sawada Tsunayoshi is his _mother’s child._ He wasn’t made for violence. Not for hate. Enduring it? Maybe. For a short time. His mother can be terrifying, after all. And once, once upon a time, Tsuna had thought that maybe, he could grow beyond that. Maybe, he could’ve made himself stronger and stronger until he was strong enough to take on the world.

But he is not. They threw him into the pit and he buried himself deeper, and now he can’t go back. This is his psyche, unstable. He’ll never be fourteen and untouched again.)

He dreams of fighting in the rain.

.

_(He’s never seen anything but this fight in his soulmate dreams, nothing but this fight, and the corpse after. He’s beginning to see just why that is)_

_._

Enma is twenty-one and an earthquake shakes up Simon Island. They return to it to survey the damage.

It is Kaoru who discovers Cozart Simon’s grave split in two, and he comes to get them, screaming at the top of his lungs.

There are several peculiar things about the grave:

  1. Though there is only one name upon the gravestone, there are two skeletons within it. Julie, who loves archaeology, claims they’re both male upon closer inspection.
  2. There are several items buried with them, most which must’ve been of wood or other materials that degraded with time. One though, a box, has survived the test of time reasonably.
  3. What is within this box is far more shocking than a grave opening so cleanly, so perfectly, as if someone had planned it.



The Simon rings.

Enma dreams of the ring on his finger as he fights his soulmate.

.

_(Never did anything feel more right)_

_._

Tsuna is twenty-two, and the Simon attack to take their revenge upon the Vongola.

Perhaps, had Tsuna been fourteen and unknowing, they would have succeeded. But Tsuna is twenty-two and exhaustingly mad, and his soulmate looks him into the eyes.

The dawn breaks.

(Enma has the emblem of his family in his eyes, and it reminds him of his duty, of his hate, of what he _must do_ to avenge his family. He charges, the universe at his fingertips, the mirror image of his soulmate. He’s a black hole. There’s nothing left inside. Nothing, except hunger for revenge, and it’s never, _never_ enough)

The sun rises, but the redhead doesn’t stop, and Tsuna does the only thing he can to face this hatred, such a mirror to his own. Zero point break-though flows past his fingers, ice building up ice.

‘’Decimo,’’ his soulmate hisses.

And Tsuna does not _want_ to be this, so he snarls back.

It’s a tiny mistake, but it’s enough. Tsuna’s never good at keeping his flames in control. He needs one hundred percent concentration for the technique, and he _currently does not have that._

The ice spreads too far, and Enma’s blood freezes in his veins.

Boom.

Boom.

….

Silence is the loudest thing in existence, as Enma’s heartbeat ceases.

Tsuna s _creams_ without sound and stares at the sky with eyes unseeing- who stole the stars? Who stole his joy? His sanity? His.. His… Soulmates life?

Oh.

Wait.

That was him.

In another fit of madness, he destroys the Vongola rings.

.

_(Enma’s world goes dark._

_Dead men do not dream)_

.

Sawada Tsunayoshi is twenty-four and Byakuran Gesso is taking over the world.

And Tsuna can’t stop him. Because his father is a cruel man. Because he is his mother’s child. Because Reborn is dead, and because he had all the potential of the world when he was fourteen, but he does not now, and it will be their death.

Or it won’t.

Shoichi is a _brilliant_ inventor.

.

_(A time machine, of all things)_

.

In a better world, fourteen-year-old Sawada Tsunayoshi is pulled into the future he does not know the past of and defeats Byakuran.

Kozato Enma’s dreams of the future suddenly take a turn for the better.

**Author's Note:**

> The other corpse in Cozart’s grave is Giotto- who, as many who read my other stories know- I headcanon as having gone to his lover Cozart at the end of his life. Most notably, it is a nudge towards my Giotto-centric fic [Hallelujah](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14136363/chapters/32576913)


End file.
